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By Barbara OrtutayAssociated Press • Monday February 24, 2014 1:10 AM

NEW YORK — People take to Twitter to talk about everything from politics to breakfast to Justin
Bieber in what feels like a chaotic stream of messages. So it may come as a surprise that the
conversations on the short-messaging service fit into just six distinct patterns.

The Pew Research Center, working with the Social Media Research Foundation and using a special
software tool, analyzed and mapped millions of public tweets, retweets, hashtags and replies that
form the backbone of Twitter chatter. The resulting diagrams show how people, brands, news outlets
and celebrities interact on Twitter, depending on the topic of conversation.

When it comes to politics, for example, Twitter’s citizens tend to form two distinct groups that
rarely interact with each other, divided along liberal and conservative lines, according to the
report. Liberals tend to post links to mainstream news sources; conservatives link to websites with
a conservative blend, according to the study.

The researchers are quick to note that not everyone uses Twitter — only 14 percent of the U.S.
population does — and not all who use it talk about politics, for example. Still, looking at how
conversations flow on social media can provide insights into how people communicate.

What emerged in maps of political conversations is that the liberal and conservative groups are
not even arguing with each other. Rather, they are “ignoring one another while pointing to
different Web resources and using different hashtags,” according to the study.

The other five types of conversations:

• People who talk about well-known brands on Twitter tend to be disconnected from one another,
focusing only on the topic at hand and not really interacting with others. The study calls these “
brand clusters.” One graph, which looked at mentions of Apple, found that users didn’t follow,
reply to or mention any other person who also tweeted about the company.

• People who tweet from a social-media conference, or about another highly specialized topic,
tend to form tight crowds of people who are connected to one another as followers. There are only a
few users who are not connected to at least a few others in the group.

• “Community clusters” happen when several evenly sized Twitter groups are connected to one
another. In a sense, these can be compared “to people clustering in different stalls at a bazaar.”
The conversations in such a group share a common broader topic, whether that’s Michelle Obama or a
tech conference, but each cluster takes a different focus.

• “Broadcast networks” are often media outlets or prominent social-media figures with a lot of
followers who repeat the messages that such outlets send out.

• A Twitter “support network” is the last major conversation type. These conversations usually
involve a large company, such as a bank or an airline, that listens and replies to consumer
complaints. When mapped, the interactions in these groups tend to look like a bicycle wheel hub
with many spokes.

The Pew Research Center says it will continue to rely on telephone polls to take the pulse of
the country on everything from politics to race, religion and technology. But Lee Rainie, one of
the study’s authors and director of the Pew Research Internet Project, said looking at social media
can give insights into important information about people’s lives.